Vodafone Idea shares punched to a 10-week high today, up nearly 8% on heavy volume, as the stock rides a wave of optimism over an SBI-led bank consortium reportedly nearing a ₹35,000-crore funding deal — plus renewed hopes of an industry tariff hike. The stock has now more than doubled over the past year.
It's a great headline. But pull up Vi's actual quarterly numbers, and a much more sobering picture emerges — one that every investor chasing this rally should understand before hitting buy.
The EPS Chart That Looks Like a Turnaround
Look at Vodafone Idea's reported EPS over the last five quarters and it appears the company is on the verge of breaking even:
Quarter
Reported EPS
Sep 2025
-0.51
Dec 2025
-0.49
Mar 2026
+4.80
Jun 2026
-0.35
A jump from a 20-quarter losing streak to a positive EPS of +4.80 looks like the inflection point every Vi shareholder has been waiting for. Extrapolate that trend forward and you'd expect the company to be solidly profitable by now.
It isn't. And the reason why matters.
Two One-Time Gains, Back to Back
That +4.80 in March 2026 wasn't operating profit — it was accounting. The Department of Telecommunications reassessed and slashed Vi's AGR dues that quarter, from ₹87,695 crore down to ₹64,046 crore, with repayment pushed out to FY32–FY41. The resulting one-time gain: ₹57,491 crore. Strip that out, and Vi's actual underlying loss that quarter was still roughly ₹5,515 crore — right in line with every quarter around it.
Then came June 2026, where the headline EPS of -0.35 looked like a continuation of the "improvement." It wasn't that either. That quarter carried its own one-off: a ₹1,816 crore fair-value gain on government warrant shares issued under the AGR-to-equity conversion, partly offset by a ₹205 crore provision. Vi's own disclosures put the real, exceptional-item-free loss at ₹5,358 crore.
Recompute EPS using only the core, recurring business, and here's what four quarters actually look like:
Quarter
Reported EPS
Core EPS (ex-exceptionals)
Sep 2025
-0.51
-0.51
Dec 2025
-0.49
-0.49
Mar 2026
+4.80
-0.51
Jun 2026
-0.35
-0.50
Flat. Dead flat, at roughly -0.50, for a full year. Not a turnaround — a plateau dressed up by two unrelated accounting events that happened to land in consecutive quarters.
What's Actually Working — and What Isn't
This isn't a story of a company doing nothing right. Operating Profit (EBITDA) has climbed steadily, from ₹4,712 crore to ₹5,034 crore over seven quarters, on the back of 20 consecutive quarters of rising ARPU and tightening opex. Revenue grew 6% year-on-year last quarter — its fastest pace in the series — and the subscriber base turned net-positive in June 2026 for the first time since the Vodafone-Idea merger.
But EBITDA of ~₹5,000 crore a quarter is running straight into an Interest + Depreciation bill of roughly ₹10,500–11,200 crore. Operating profit isn't covering even half the financing and depreciation load. That gap — not the headline EPS swings — is the entire story of why Vi is still losing money every quarter, and a straight-line projection of the real trend puts a genuine, non-exceptional breakeven years away, not the "next few quarters" the raw EPS series seems to promise.
So Why Is the Stock Up 8% Today?
Because the market isn't pricing the last four quarters — it's pricing what happens next, and there are real catalysts on the table:
The SBI-led funding package. Vi is reportedly in the final stages of closing a ₹35,000-crore facility (₹25,000 crore loan, ₹10,000 crore credit) from a 6–7 bank consortium, on top of ₹9,000+ crore in equipment orders already placed with Nokia, Ericsson, and Samsung.
Tariff hike hopes. Analysts at Elara Capital expect a further ~15% price hike by December 2026 — partly driven by Jio's own private-equity backers wanting a profitable exit post-IPO, which raises the odds of an industry-wide hike Vi badly needs.
The AGR relief itself. Even though it flattered one quarter's EPS, the underlying liability reduction and deferred repayment schedule is a real, recurring improvement to Vi's future finance costs — not just a one-time credit.
Any one of these — a bigger-than-expected tariff hike, faster ARPU growth, or a genuine reduction in interest costs from the AGR restructuring — could bend the real trend line faster than the historical numbers suggest. That's the bet today's rally is making.
The Bottom Line
Vodafone Idea's stock chart and its EPS chart are currently telling two different stories, and neither one, on its own, is the full picture. The share price is surging on genuine, forward-looking catalysts — funding, subscriber additions, tariff hikes. The EPS series, meanwhile, is padded by one-time accounting gains that mask a business whose core losses haven't moved in a year.
Whether today's 8% pop marks the start of a real re-rating or another chapter in Vi's long history of hope-driven rallies depends entirely on whether that SBI deal closes and whether a tariff hike actually lands — not on what the last four quarters of reported EPS appear to show.
This is not investment advice. The figures above are drawn from Vodafone Idea's reported quarterly financials and public news coverage of today's trading session; readers should consult company filings, analyst research, and a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.